Until recently, the hospital has always been the center of the healthcare system. The explosion of health care technology, however, has resulted in new concepts like home-based health care services and telemedicine services. If given a choice, people with chronic illness prefer to stay at home and receive appropriate medical care through home-based health care services for economic and personal considerations rather than in a hospital. In the United States, more than 90 million people have chronic illness. The top 5 chronic illnesses are heart diseases, cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and diabetes. The home-based heath care services provide personal health care services to individuals or patients who require special attention as a lower cost alternative to extended stays in a hospital or convalescent homes. Indeed, for many patients with a chronic illness who require intermittent skilled nursing care, the therapy is often better provided in a home environment than in a hospital, in accordance with a plan of treatment established by the patient's physician. Generally the home health care visits are made by a registered nurse, certified nursing assistant, physical therapist, occupational therapist, speech or language pathologist, medical social care giver, psychiatric nurse, registered dietician, or a semi-skilled employee based on a preset schedule to carry out an allocated or assigned task in accordance with a treatment plan.
A prime concern of the health care provider is to manage and control the delivery and the quality of the home health care service. When an exceptional circumstance has arisen to put a particular patient at risk, it is often difficult to quickly assess the risk for each patient being cared for and to identify the particular patient requiring special attention. The health care providers have minimal emergency control measures to deal with an exceptionally critical situation adequately. Hence there is a need to collect and control patient data efficiently and effectively to provide adequate medical care during an emergency at the earliest instance. Also, there is a need to monitor home health care services personnel to acquire patient data and to collect data regarding the medical assistance provided to the patient to ensure quality of service, prevent the generation of errors and fraudulent activity in medical insurance claiming process.
The U.S. Patent Publication No. 20050021369 discloses a system and method for managing context relevant information and a display provided with a wireless information device to provide a user with context relevant information based on the identity of the user, location of the device and proximity of the device to persons.
The U.S. Patent Publication No. 20050131740 discloses a management tool for health care providers. The system has a communication system to couple a server computer to a field information device so that health care giver may access patient data information stored on a server and the server may receive an indication of the location of a visiting nurse.
The EP Patent No. 1622057 discloses a method and a system for providing a home health care and information and communication technology platform. The system has a communication interface to provide a communication between mobile terminals and a central server to permit the exchange of data to ensure that the data is synchronized with mobile terminals and central server.
The WO Patent No. 2005038691 discloses a health care delivery information management system, has an interface processor to receive an identification data of a patient. The display processor generates a data representing a specific type of heath information for a given patient in response to a user selected item.
Thus the currently available health care service monitoring systems and health care service providing systems do not have adequate systems and solutions to monitor and track the visit of health care personal to patient home on a priority basis and to improve the reliability and consistency of the health care services. Hence there is a need to monitor the visit of a visiting nurse remotely in a non-obtrusive manner, to collect the activities of the visiting nurse and patient to generate a prioritized report to enhance the efficiency, accuracy, accountability, and overall level of care for visiting nurses.